The Experience of Longing

Longing. A hot topic these days, but when I did my dissertation on "The Experience of Longing" in 1993, it was an esoteric concept with very little research. Even though the ten individuals I interviewed all “longed for” different things, there were universal themes to the lived experience.    I’ll spare you details of the type of research and just share the five major themes of my findings:   

1. A pull across a distance; a stretching toward connection 
   Longing is experienced as separation across time, space, or emotional distance. Participants describe an unreachable object or state that feels both distant and familiar, creating a quest-like movement toward connection. 
2. The pain of loss 
   Longing involves absence, emptiness, grief, frustration, powerlessness, and sometimes desperation. Participants describe it as painful, insatiable, and often impossible to satisfy fully. 
3. Changing yet enduring 
   Longing shifts in intensity and form. It may come and go, feel rhythmic, become quieter or louder, and change as people learn to resist, accept, or embrace it. At the same time, many participants experience longing as a permanent part of the self. 
4. Escaping from the present 
   Longing moves people out of the present through nostalgia, fantasy, and anticipation. It reaches backward toward the past, forward toward future fulfillment, and into imagined possibilities that offer comfort or hope. 
5. An internal, solitary experience 
   Longing is deeply private, difficult to express, and often bodily felt. Participants describe withdrawal from the external world, intense inward focus, aloneness, and physical sensations such as tightness, aching, breathlessness, and internal energy. 

Longing is paradoxical: it is painful yet life-giving, isolating yet oriented toward connection, rooted in loss yet filled with hope. It is portrayed as a mysterious, regenerative force that draws people toward meaning, wholeness, creativity, self-understanding, and deeper connection with others. 

And here is the final summary:

The experience of longing is a paradoxical experience leaving the experiencer in a dilemma, a double-bind, a Catch-22. Longing turns in on itself. One reaches out across an expanse toward fulfillment in trust and hope. In reaching out: pain & loss and an imminent yearning for fulfillment are experienced.   

Longing is the grief of the unattainable, the impossible. It is hope toward possibility and infinite enhancement. Both despair and promise exist together in longing, rhythms of death 
and birth, birth and death. There is movement forward across expanses so wide one cannot see the other side and must trust and rationalize that, "There is something to move toward." Yet the 
motion is also backward, recoiling and requiring one to nurse the wounds of separation and aloneness. Nothing is there, yet something is felt, a presence.  A person reaches out deliberately and with intent toward the hope for release of pain. They elicit the pain, the frustration, the anguish living within. Longing is at the interface of the losses of yesterday, the open wounds of separation, and the joyful creations of tomorrow. 

Longing hurts so desperately, and still it continues; still the hunger and the itch arise within. It is the primitive pulse of life, a primordial memory of who one has been. It calls the experiencers, drawing them nearer toward meaning, toward fulfillment, toward connection, toward thy self.  

Longing reaches for freedom, for space, for time, for self. There is rhythm; there is an intricate balance between satisfaction and the insatiable quest for more. The seed has been planted, the promise made, the pilgrimage set out upon. Experiencers must traverse the land, seeking the bridge 
between who they have been and who they can be. They travail across the disparity, the discord of who they are and who they imagine they can be. This longing movement forges the infiniteness of inner imaginings and enriches the connections here on earth. 

Longing is a complete and utter mystery to its experiencers. It is suffering and it is pleasure. It is inside, yet it is outside. It is permanent and ever-present, yet it changes so quickly, often, and in many ways. 

Longing is tricky, elusive, quick as a frightened deer running through the forest. One is left unsure if it will ever leave and also left hoping for its return.  

The experience of longing is a thirst to connect deeply. The myriad objects of connection are unique expressions of humanity. Like fingerprints, they reveal whole worlds of each person's inner self. They reveal individual constellations of desire and unique journeys of possibility, wholeness, completion, and love. The longing moves so silently, and so quickly is in search of itself, freely romping and gallantly jumping.  

Longing is the fuel which keeps the inner fires aflame. It evokes passions which burn brightly, eternally, always calling. 

Longing is an act of redemption. It aims ultimately to make life good again, to bring forth meaning again, to evoke life again. It is the pale, translucent green bud emerging from a desolate burnt-out ground. It is the seedling which sprouts from the emptiness, after the destruction. 

Longing is life calling itself to itself. It is symbolized by the streams and tributaries of lakes and oceans and waters that flourish within. It is also a thundering storm, or a misty morning dew, water absorbed by gentle capillaries. 

The longing experience is regenerating. It guides, persuades, and coaxes the person toward connectedness, toward what one hungers for, the call of being and of loving kindness. 

Longing entices, encourages, creates forward movement. Longing is a new life, connected to life, to the pulse of life. The experience of longing points to the invisible, unnamable mystery which is in the world and yet beyond it. Longing is rooted in the here and now intensely yet just as clearly it is a yearning for the eternal, pure and perfect belonging to self and other. 

 It is human to feel longings – even though many people try to quench or push these feelings out of sight.  It is worth it to go through the painful aspects of the experience because it enables you to come out the other side – to the richness of this life-giving force.    

See what happens if you let yourself actually feel your longings?  What do you long for?    What inner longings do you need to hear?  What is calling you that you don’t listen to?